How To Make Your HTML Newsletter Look Good

How To Make Your HTML Email Newsletter Look Good, Time After Time

You want your ezine to look nice, don't you? A common error we've seen over and over again is folks who make their ezine look all pretty, but it arrives in their subscribers' inboxes in greater disarray than a curly haired lad at the end of a 200 mile motorcycle trip without a helmet.

The Secret....
Two words: Text Editor.
A text editor is a simple program that composes plain text. Just text, nothing but the text. It does not allow for any formatting (bold, underline, color, font changes, etc.) like a word processing program does. Every operating system comes with a built-in text editor. Look in your system for Notepad or Simple Text or Text Edit.

The Anti-Formatter...
Word Processing, e.g. Microsoft Word. Such programs write in what is called Rich Text Format (RTF). While you may think you are writing just plain text, even if you are not adding formatting, you're really composing in RTF, which has a whole lot of unseen things going on in the background that may not show their ugly heads until it hits your subscriber's inbox.

The Mother of the Anti-Formatter...
To make RTF matters worse, many Word Processing programs come with an HTML option. Sometimes this is in the form of "save as HTML," other times it is presented as plain flat-out "compose HTML document." There's a reason these programs are called Word Processors, and that's because word processing is what they are designed to do. There's a whole other type of application called HTML editors, and that's what they're designed to do. Never compose HTML in a Word Processing program, it's asking for formatting trouble from the get go!

Now What?
Now take that boring-looking ezine content that you composed in your plain text editor, and paste it into a reliable HTML editor. Why reliable? Because many HTML editors write really bad HTML code, which also will birth formatting nightmares in email programs. Once your content is pasted into your HTML editor, now is the time to do all of your fancy formatting.

Again, the point is to compose in plain text using a text editor, and format in a reliable HTML editor. This will ensure that your ezine formatting is pretty and consistent every time.